Walking into the Ocean (26 page)

This stratagem was a mistake. Maris had little to deliver on the criminal profiling front. If I were a reporter, Peter thought, I'd ask if the Yard was prepared to take over the investigation. The answer would be no, but . . .

The same reporter, a little too eagerly, jumped in: “Has Scotland Yard done a behavioural assessment of the killer?”

Maris saved Peter from having to dissemble. The cameras stayed on the Whittlesun chief. “We are developing our profile here. We believe the killer is a male, relatively young given that he carried two, possibly three of his victims some distance, and he's comfortable with the territory along the coast. Even so, we're not prepared to state that he is a local man. He seizes opportunities. We are watching.”

Maris handled other questions artfully, sidestepping any inference that Dorset residents should panic. Peter thought it true cosmic luck that the Olympics were not mentioned at all. Several newswire and
TV
reporters tried to probe the issue of public fear as the Rover moved east, but Maris reiterated the tandem themes of public precaution and increased police surveillance of the cliffs. The lock-up-your-daughters refrain, in Peter's opinion, would wear itself out soon, but for now it bought the Task Force some time. It all depended on deterring the predator from further attacks on the high cliffs. It was also fortunate for Maris that the questioning by the press reps was poorly coordinated. But Peter was flabbergasted by the complete absence of questions concerning Daniella Garvena, until he realized that someone had put the screws to the media outlets across southern Britain; they had agreed to respect the Italian family's privacy. But how long could this manipulation last, and what promises had been made to gain media cooperation?

Peter glanced at Maris's smug face. The inspector was doing a fine job of burning up the time, and was almost home, safe as houses.

Wendie Merwyn, whom Peter had failed to see lurking behind one of the cameras in the middle of the room, stepped forward. She focused on Peter. “Has New Scotland Yard been directly involved? Is there some thinking that the Yard should take over the Rover case?”

Peter knew where she was going with this, and so did Inspector Maris. Peter was tempted to shunt the question off to the Whittlesun chief, but he was saved by the failure of Merwyn's cameraman to follow her line of sight. The bright lights stayed on Maris, and he jumped in.

“At the risk of sounding bureaucratic, the Yard is providing cooperative liaison. They have volunteered all their capacity, as needed, but the Task Force remains a Regional operation, and that is sufficient for the moment.”

It was apparent to both Peter and Maris that Merwyn, not surprisingly, was digging for a headline, and “cooperative liaison” wasn't it. But his non-reply left an opening for a supplementary from the blond news anchor — Why, then, haven't you made more progress? What, then, does Chief Inspector Cammon bring to the table, and why was he gallivanting around the Jurassic Cliffs yesterday morning? But she posed neither question. Peter found her intriguing.

Hamm's energy was flagging, and Maris moved to sum up. Peter saw the risk: they were hopeful of getting away unscathed, but Maris had been too vague. He had to give them something for the front page, yet his wrap-up was more of the same.

“We are doubling our police presence inside Dorset, but it makes sense for residents not to wander, not to let their children go off without supervision and, naturally, not to talk to strangers. You know each other and you know your community, and you are in the best position to notice the unusual . . .”

He thought he was safe, but Wendie Merwyn stepped forward again. This time Peter was staring into a lens and bright lights. She had been redirecting the camera, and that was the reason she hadn't launched a supplementary question. Now, she stood almost touching the head table. The camera swooped in on her, and Peter sensed that it would soon turn to his face for a close-up reaction.

“Chief Inspector Cammon,” she began in her mezzo newsreader tone, “I understand that you are managing the investigation into the death of Anna Lasker, and the disappearance of her husband.”

Peter stated calmly: “I am assisting, and . . .”

“Assisting when you are not leading searches along the cliffs for the predator known as the Rover. Which is Scotland Yard's priority?”

“Neither investigation is being led by New Scotland Yard.”

“Chief Inspector, can you tell us where the Lasker case stands at this point? It has been two weeks or more. Do you know where André Lasker is?”

Maris stood up but the camera failed to move over his way. “The investigation of Mrs. Lasker is continuing and is making progress,” he said, to hollow space.

“Has an arrest warrant been issued for Anna Lasker's murder?” she persisted, with the camera still on Peter.

“No.”

“Why not?” she said.

“Because,” said Peter, “Anna Lasker committed suicide.”

Why the hell had he done it?
He didn't know. (Stan Bracher, later reporting back to Bartleben, said, “That's the kind of crap Cammon is always pulling.”)

Perhaps only Merwyn, Maris and Peter immediately understood his revelation. Other reporters had been entirely focused on the Rover murders and resented her shifting attention to a local crime on which there had been little progress. Peter's answer certainly begged a follow-up, but Maris at once called the session to an end, and everyone stood up, eager to leave the stuffy room. For once, Peter was glad to be short, and he attempted to slip away through the outflowing police detectives. He only succeeded in evading Maris by the quick assistance of Jerry Plaskow. He caught the eye of Bracher, who offered only what Peter's mother would have called a “watery” smile; there would be no rescue by the Canadian, and Peter decided that Stan would have to find his own way back to the hotel. Jerry took him by the elbow and hustled him out the back of the Whittlesun station and into the parking area. They paused, out of breath.

“I think we'd better run for it,” Jerry said. Neither man was encumbered by files or briefcases, and so Jerry began to jog towards the back of the lot. Moving around cars and motorcycles, and a
TV
-20 equipment van, they ran to the next street, and only a block later did they dare stop. They had distanced any pursuers and now, Peter gauged, they were two streets up and two over from his Subaru. Jerry made to leave in the other direction. Peter didn't worry about whether Jerry had transportation. He was one of those soldiers who disappeared into the night, like Peter's
SAS
guardian angel.

“What was that all about?” Jerry said.

“It happens sometimes,” Peter replied, calm now. He looked up and down the street. He had stepped back from the drama in the briefing room, and was more or less philosophical about it now.

Plaskow reacted in the best possible way. He laughed. “Are you still up for dinner tonight?”

“Certainly,” Peter said. “Let's eat in the hotel restaurant. As far as I can tell, it's decent. Do you know where Sarah is staying?”

“Not at the Sunset Arms. I've arranged to pick her up at seven at the Marine Institute. Is 7:30 good for you?”

“Sure. Gives me time to . . . recover.” He was perspiring.

“How are you feeling?'

“Bruises are healing. Jerry . . . ?”

“Yup.”

It was time to pay some dues. “Could you thank your colleague for me?”

“Smith.”

“Your
SAS
man is named Smith?”

“No,” Jerry laughed. “Better get out of here, Inspector.”

When Peter retrieved his rental car, he sat looking straight ahead at the empty street. The crowd from the briefing had dispersed, but it was safer to abandon the area entirely. He turned the Subaru around and climbed randomly into an unfamiliar part of the grid until he found a deserted side avenue with a view of the sea.

The street was dead quiet. He wasn't in the mood he expected to be in. For one thing, he felt little interest in chewing over why he'd done it. He glanced down the hill at the Whittlesun rooftops and, although he spied no landmarks, he knew precisely where the Sunset Arms stood, and how to reach it by road. He had always been terrible with compass points, and this was some kind of progress, to have picked up a new spatial sensitivity at this late age. It gave him new confidence. He would drive back without employing the SatNav.

He thought about his mother, long buried in the democratic City of London Cemetery. She never suffered fools; to his knowledge, his father had managed to avoid conversing with fools entirely. His father had been a barrister, and he valued the finiteness of the law, the closure that the legal process brought to every case. His mother taught, and she was the one with the dreamier, epic view. She talked about “the stages of man.” Humans passed through archetypal phases of awareness as they matured. (She taught adolescents English and biology, so Peter supposed she knew.) A boy started out optimistic, she said, with a faith that events were subsets of an epic mechanism, a rolling machine called society. Education was about placement of your experience in that epic context. Peter remembered her caution, though, that too many men and women gave up on the vision; their dreams stalled and dissipated with old age.

For a career policeman, the tension between the epic and the ordinary was never settled. It wasn't even a matter of balance. You lived with both or you went a bit crazy. You might tell yourself that the Rover was a grand villain, diabolical, a one-man schizophrenic cabal, who staged Arthurian farewells in the weathered stone fields of south Britain. But this predator, he believed, wouldn't know a Tennyson lament from a Viking ritual from a sunrise ceremony at Stonehenge. He might be all the more dangerous for his game-playing, but his classical sensibility was shoddy. Killers — especially the ones who toyed with the authorities — often believed they invented murder. All they did was reinvent clichés, inviting the pursuing detective to sink into his nightmare of the sordid, the mundane and the disappointing. The Rover would stay one step ahead, until suddenly he wasn't, and it would take the hard slogging of the police to set the trap.

He gave Maris some credit for understanding this. The inspector had refused to buy into the epic crime spree of the predator. Peter hadn't meant to undermine him with his sudden revelation; he wasn't spiteful. It was a pity that he had had to do it, but there was one fugitive out there who did think in epic terms of crime and just punishment, of guilt and free conscience, of death and the need to affirm life.

He had pronounced Anna's suicide in order to attract André Lasker's attention.

To his surprise, there were no messages for him at the desk at the Sunset Arms, nor was his phone blinking when he got to his room. He washed up but decided not to change his clothes. He was looking forward to dining with Jerry and Sarah and felt quite good, not at all feverish anymore. It would be nice to get back to the cottage — there was no doubt that he was washed up in Whittlesun — and he should probably call Tommy Verden to pick him up tonight, and then he could treat the evening as a farewell dinner. He rang Tommy on the mobile and requested a pickup at Sam's garage at noon the next day. He planned to fit in an appointment with Sam's nephew Martin before abandoning the town. He checked the pockets of his jacket for notes and messages that he might have forgotten, and came up with the purple chits of the calls from Salvez and Wendie Merwyn.

There was a knock on the door. At its worst, it would be Maris, at its best Sarah. He opened the door to confront a young man who looked distantly familiar. He had blond hair, not far off the colour of Wendie Merwyn's, and wore a maroon sports coat worthy of a game show host. He also sported an expensive Burberry raincoat. He smiled with even teeth and came across as overly sincere, but unthreatening.

“Excuse me, Inspector Cammon? Wendie Merwyn asked me to leave you this message?” His voice turned up with uncertainty. He held out a sealed envelope.

“And you are?”

“I'm Parnell Moss, reporter with
TV
-20. I'm known as Parny Moss.”

Peter's immediate reaction was that the young fellow was likeable but wanted too much to be liked; well mannered, but on the superficial side. Peter recognized him now, though not the name. He was the weatherman on the television sitting beside Wendie Merwyn at the anchor desk. He was even more handsome in person than on the box. Peter reassessed him: he had the right kind of persuasive authority beneath the veneer, and would do well as a news reader.

“Why didn't she give it to me herself?”

“She's on air, like, now. She had to run from the press conference. I'm only about fifteen minutes behind her myself.”

“But you're the weatherman?”

“Among other things. That's why I have to get back. Wendie's doing the news now, and I tag on at the end. I'm also a reporter and a news reader. We do a bit of everything at 20. We're a small staff.”

Peter ripped open the envelope and read the note, which was what he expected:
Can we meet to follow up? Join forces? What is Kidd's Reach? Wendie M.
The third question mark was written with an elaborate curlicue. Parnell Moss stood waiting.

“I don't wish to be presumptuous, Mr. Moss, but were you hoping to interview me yourself?”

“Wendie says
she
needs to pose her questions to you.” With that self-effacing reply — or was it self-effacing? — the fellow lost momentum and looked down at the carpet. Peter decided not to embarrass him further.

“So, does everyone ask you if your parents named you after Parnell, the Irish revolutionary?”

“No. My real name is ‘Partnell.' A family thing. I thought it better sounding to adopt ‘Parnell.' More dignified that way. Then I came down to this job, and the station manager suggested ‘Parny' had a friendly feel.”

Even with this slightly evasive answer, Peter still thought he detected an Irish lilt in the boy's chatter. He was mildly curious to hear his on-air voice, and speculated that the accent would emerge as
BBC
neutral; or, showing the talent for mimicry that ambitious
TV
personalities seemed to have, he might already have picked up the regional inflections. For that matter, Peter wanted to hear Wendie Merwyn's broadcast voice again; he needed a better fix on her.

“Tell Miss Merwyn that she can call me here, leave a message.”

Parnell Moss thanked Peter and strode away down the corridor.

It was about time to meet Jerry and Sarah. He turned on the television, but for some reason could not find Wendie Merwyn's newscast; she had probably just finished. He took the elevator to the lobby, desperate for a drink. His daughter and Plaskow had already found a table at the back of the shadowed restaurant.

“Fancy meeting you,” Jerry said, lightly.

Sarah sat to Jerry's right and jumped up from her seat to give her father a tight hug. She looked him up and down, assessing his health, and maybe his state of mind, he thought. In the recesses of the restaurant there was barely enough light to read faces, but the shadows allowed them to indulge in conspiratorial talk. Sarah was openly glad to be with her father, and Jerry knew it, and the two veterans of the crime wars were happy to be drinking at the end of this very long day. Plaskow commanded a rum and Coke from the waitress. Peter ordered beer, as usual, while Sarah already had a bottle of claret in front of her. They took a moment, sipped their drinks. Peter looked at Sarah, and her response showed that she didn't mind shop talk. She was completely relaxed and promised to interject when she felt like it. Jerry struck the right upbeat note immediately by mentioning what, on another night, might have been verboten.

“Mr. Smith thanks you,” he said. Peter explained who his rescuer was, although Plaskow added few background details about the
SAS
commando.

“I'm afraid I lost both your walkie-talkies in the drink.”

“That's okay. He went back for them.”

“You mean he
dove
for them? Were they that valuable?”

“Well, Peter, Smith was diving for the bicycle anyway. Thought he might as well retrieve the radios as well.”

“He found it?”

“Sure. Maris sent his people out to search the cave. We helped. But they found nothing beyond that wool hat belonging to the poor girl.” Jerry made the sign of the cross. “So, Peter, what was that all about this afternoon?”

“I'm guessing that Lasker is alive. I wanted to goose him a little, make him feel guilty.”

“Maris was pretty steamed.”

Peter murmured his understanding, but there was no guilt in his voice. “I'm leaving tomorrow, ahead of the firestorm.” He looked at Sarah. “Lasker's out there.”

“I'll bet Maris's already been on the blower to Sir Stephen,” Jerry said.

“We'll run it from London for a while,” Peter said resignedly, but without going into detail.

He explained what Jerry would already know but Sarah would not. “Maris will shift the burden of non-success to the Yard anyway. It was already starting to happen. It's in the Yard's interest to find Lasker any way we can, either through Interpol or Passport Services.”

“Or,” Sarah said “at some point you come back and arrest him in Whittlesun.”

“You figure he's alive, and in touch with events?” Jerry said.

Peter hesitated, and then looked at Sarah. “I was thinking about your grandmother today.” He glanced over at Jerry to show that he was welcome in the conversation. “She used to say to me that people don't understand the balance between the epic and the ordinary, and they get worse at it as they age. You were talking the other night about the day you decided to become a marine biologist. Well, for me, it was that piece of philosophy from my mother.”

“That, and Sherlock Holmes,” Sarah said.

“Agreed. I've worked for years to figure out how crime works, the psyche behind it and how a policeman should react. Violent crime seems like a grand scheme at the beginning, full of calculating intent and detailed planning. But later, the criminal almost always disappoints you, his motives exposed as callous, his emotions overruling logic, his visionary clarity suddenly murky and not very impressive. It's a lot like life itself. But here's the thing.”

Peter paused to give Jerry a chance to complete the analysis. The sailor glanced at Sarah before responding. It was clear to her that he was about to reveal a truth about her father.

“The thing is,” Jerry said, “you have to go through the epic stuff before you can understand the bad guys' mistakes.”

Peter nodded. “Yes. An ordinary way to put it is that you have to understand his intentions before you understand his pettiness. But it's more than that. André Lasker had a romantic fantasy of what he would find, probably somewhere on the far side of the world. The same with the predator. This Rover fellow thinks he's smarter than everyone else. Seldom have I seen anyone more in love with the game. He toys with us, with his sacrificial posing of the victims, his bloodless kills, but it's all about the game with him. With André, I had to understand what happened at the house before I could understand the husband. And Anna herself made the epic, if gruesome, gesture by desecrating their home and jumping from the cliff. She assaulted his romantic image of himself.”